Friday, May 8, 2009

Finally A Run! And Another Failed Platelets Donation :-(

This week has been a doozy at work. The system that we're deploying had an outage this week and I've been on lots of recovery, troubleshooting and root cause analysis calls. Last night's call went until 11:30pm - YUCK!

Anyhow, I'm pretty confident that I'll have more 14 hour days ahead of me in the next 6 weeks. With a bunch more layoffs occurring at my company this week, I can't really complain too much...

My wonderful wife let me "sleep in" until about 6:45am this morning (OK, my younger son ran into the room at 6am to declare that he waited "until there was a 6 on the clock" before coming into our room. I decided that I would get to the office a bit later than normal since I worked so late last night, and I went out for a 4 mile run before work.

It was such a wonderful day to run. Sun shining, 60 degrees, slight breeze - truly scrumptious! My first mile seemed effortless - even after not running for a full 4 days - 10:14 with an average HR of 142.

However, the effortless feeling would not last long. My heart rate started to elevate a bit on mile 2, to the point that by the time I got to the big hill on Argosy Street, I either needed to walk or see my heart rate in the 160s early in the run. I elected to walk. I think it was a good move as by the time I got to the top of the hill and was ready to run again, my heart rate was back down in the 130s.

At lunchtime, I attempted a platelets donation once again. I won't go into the gory details, but it ended just like the last time - with a stinging bulge in my right (receiving) arm. I guess I'm going to have to stick to whole blood donations - which of course brings my average heart rate up on my runs for a few days, and doesn't get back to normal for about 3 weeks. I don't know if I can afford for my HR to get any higher (and my running any slower) than it is now...